Oklahoma warden's wife gets year for aiding escape

OKLAHOMA

Tim Talley, Associated Press

Published
4:00 am PST, Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Bobbi Parker is lead from the Greer County Courthouse in Mangum after her sentencing, Monday, Nov. 7, 2011. Parker was sentenced to a year in prison for helping a convicted murderer escape from prison in 1994. (AP Photo/The Oklahoman, David McDaniel) less

Bobbi Parker is lead from the Greer County Courthouse in Mangum after her sentencing, Monday, Nov. 7, 2011. Parker was sentenced to a year in prison for helping a convicted murderer escape from prison in 1994. ... more

Photo: David McDaniel, AP

Photo: David McDaniel, AP

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Bobbi Parker is lead from the Greer County Courthouse in Mangum after her sentencing, Monday, Nov. 7, 2011. Parker was sentenced to a year in prison for helping a convicted murderer escape from prison in 1994. (AP Photo/The Oklahoman, David McDaniel) less

Bobbi Parker is lead from the Greer County Courthouse in Mangum after her sentencing, Monday, Nov. 7, 2011. Parker was sentenced to a year in prison for helping a convicted murderer escape from prison in 1994. ... more

Photo: David McDaniel, AP

Oklahoma warden's wife gets year for aiding escape

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Oklahoma City --

The wife of a former Oklahoma prison warden was sentenced Monday to a year in prison for helping a convicted killer escape 17 years ago.

Jurors had recommended the one-year sentence that she received from Judge Richard Darby, Assistant District Attorney David Thomas said by phone from the courthouse in Mangum, 120 miles southwest of Oklahoma City.

Parker is appealing her conviction, and Darby ordered her to remain in custody pending the outcome of that appeal.

Prosecutors say Parker fell in love with Dial while the pair worked together in a prison pottery program based out of the garage of the deputy warden's house, which was on the prison grounds. Witnesses testified that they saw Bobbi Parker and Dial behave inappropriately at the home, which she shared with young daughters and her husband, who was deputy warden at the time.

Acting on a tip, authorities found the pair living together as man and wife in a cramped mobile home on a chicken ranch in Campti, Texas, on April 4, 2005.

Defense attorneys said Dial drugged Parker, kidnapped her at knifepoint and held her hostage by threatening to use his alleged mob connections to harm her family, including her daughters, if she ran away or sought help.

Dial was returned to prison to continue serving a life sentence for first-degree murder in the 1981 slaying of a karate instructor in Tulsa County. He died in 2007 at age 62 but maintained until his death that he had kidnapped Parker and that what she said was true - that she was not an accomplice.

Prosecutors alleged that Dial and Parker made a pact that if either was discovered, he would say he kidnapped her and held her hostage.